Methylene Blue has shown promise as an alzheimer's treatment. It's a potent antifungal. It easily diffuses through the blood brain barrier. It also happens to be cheap and unpatentable.
Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
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Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
In either case it makes a lot of sense to start dosing patients with anti-fungal medication and see if their symptoms improve. Usually you do not give fungicide to patients because it has a lot of side-effects but those drugs are readily available and easily prescribed.
Not sure why you got downvoted. It would have to be done in double blind trials vs placebo, but it would be a great way to test the causal link between fungi and symptoms. You'd have to make sure the fungicides cross the blood brain barrier in patients.
Haven't we studied the effects of Alzheimers enough not to need the control group? I worked in clinical trials and one study still haunts me knowing what happened to the control group.
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#73So, turns out there's many types of fungus that affect behavior, and there are even a few that create entirely new behaviors. One such example is ants, when infected by a type of fungus, will climb high and latch onto a branch by biting hard into it. This is so that the ant will get eaten by birds, which then complete the life cycle of that fungus.
There's not many well understood systems (the other well-studied one is toxoplasmosis and cats), but one researcher on Experiment, Charissa de Bekker, just released a new paper with findings from her project.
The results gave a first clue about the many genes that are involved in this manipulated biting behavior. For instance, that the fungus is likely producing LSD-like compounds and is secreting proteins that could affect serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain, as well as the ant’s ability to communicate through chemosignals with their nest mates. As well, in the paper, they release the entire transcriptome taken from the brains of these ants, giving other scientists a chance to use this as a model system and to begin to target which genes go on to influence behavior.
I was just talking to her about it this week, and so this news is very timely and a bit eerie. But very cool.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/s12864-015-1812-x.p...
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, there are antifungal drugs that pass the BBB, with varying efficacy: https://www.medicine.wisc.edu/sites/default/files/domfiles/i... Second, antifungals have positively affected AD-like symptoms, though possibly through misdiagnosis.
It's known to be pretty difficult to treat a lot of fungal infections in the CNS. The agents we have are pretty nasty, with severe side effects.
totally - but if you can effectively treat a substantial percentage, that's huge. And some effective antifungals have what many consider tolerable in the face of AD.
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#75As a biomedical researcher, I'm confident in calling this sloppy science. There is no quantitation of staining differences across multiple fields (to demonstrate that the images aren't hand picked), no controls with the PCR study (or even showing the results besides one in the supplement), and no demonstration that the antibodies don't bind to amyloid. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this wouldn't even motivate me to perform a follow up study.
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#76It's hard not to exaggerate the implications of this study if fungal infection does turn out to be the cause of AD given how huge this would be for humanity. Just off the top of my head I can say this disease has effected my family (1 set of grandparents effected by this disease so far) so I'd like for the conclusion to be correct. I guess the next step would be testing the hypothesis with more people with AD to see…
The discovery, if corroborated by others, could indeed be huge but I'm afraid it wouldn't open up new treatment options anytime soon. Fungal infections inside the body are really really hard to treat in the first place. Add to that the blood-brain barrier which makes it very hard to treat any type of infection in the brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier#Fu... Combination of these two facto…
According to your link, there is a possibility that some cases of Alzheimers are caused by a degraded blood-brain barrier, which might also allow for fungal infections to take hold more readily.
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#77Wow sounds like a major breakthrough. How did they not notice this before?
They still haven't decided for sure if dietary cholesterol is bad for you, or salt for that matter. The best minds of our generation are too busy selling ads to be bothered with trivial stuff like this.
Thanks for telling us how you think other people should be spending their lives. That's super valuable!
(For the record, work in healthcare, but no doubt am wasting my time saving the wrong lives.)
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypertension is correlated with mortality, but reducing blood pressure does not seem to improve patient outcomes.
Most evidence does not suggest this. 2015: "[...] the NIH made the bold announcement that intensive intervention with a combo of three drugs to reach a new target systolic blood pressure of under 120 mm Hg reduced the rate of heart attacks, heart failure and stroke by 30% and cardiovascular deaths by 25%, " http://www.healthnewsreview.org/2015/09/nih-sprint-study-spa... http://www.cochrane.org/CD000028/HTN_blood-pres…
Contrary evidence is available, and there is no clear reason for the confusion.[1]. I have not read any of the studies you cite, though I will take a look as soon as I have the time. From what I have read, blood pressure reducing medication has been shown to reduce blood pressure (at the cost of severe side effects), but not reduce mortality.
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#79Hi, I do research using the same methods: immunohistochemistry. This was done with rabbit polyclonal antibodies. The key being polyclonal. We don't know what those antibodies are really staining. The difference, however, is intriguing.
Could you elaborate on what polyclonal means here? Does it mean that they might not have detected fungus after all, but some other thing that would activate the same antibodies?
Re: Different Brain Regions Are Infected with Fungi in Alzheimer’s Disease
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a layman, i understood the title correctly I guess. That there were fungi not just on one spot, but different (ie several) regions.
So, interpreting "different" as "multiple"? Seems unnecessary to use an ambiguous word. And then an ambiguous word that is not actually the main point of the study.
They meant multiple, the authors are from Spain. I'm not sure why an editor wouldn't try to alter the title though, perhaps they are also not native english speakers.